The CoachAccountable Blog

I’ve several times been asked what I was thinking to inspire the functional design of CoachAccountable.  I find it easiest to answer in terms of certain tendencies I’ve noticed over the course of coaching relationships, drawn from both coaching and being coached.  I’ll share those tendencies and how they pertain to CoachAccountable’s design, and I invite you to read along and see for yourself which ones you recognize from your own experiences, both of coaching and being coached.

Follow-through is an uphill battle.  We can make the most inspired plans during our session.  The coachee can be inspired, empowered, and clear what to do next to move themselves ahead.  But what follows in the gap until the next session is often a complete crapshoot. Life comes up, inspiration is perishable, good ideas get forgotten.  Left to one’s own devices, an individual will do what they usually do, which usually has little to do with a coaching plan.

The why of this is self-evident.  An individual is, by definition, coached in order to stretch out of their ordinary ways: to shift their circumstances, to attain heightened performance, to transform the ordinary into something else.  Absent supporting structure to help new, powerful habits become ingrained, a coaching relation often takes a step or two backwards between sessions.  This is because 7 days or more typically pass between interactions, and unless the coachee is exceptionally high caliber at self-growth and creates their own reliable mechanisms to keep the game plan alive and in action, a coach can expect to hear a lot of “No, I didn’t get around to that” or “I forgot to do that” upon reconvening.

Tracking is a haphazard and low-res affair. When it comes to qualitative progress (like income or sales or even happiness on a 10-point scale), coach and coachee tend to deal with only one, maybe two numbers: the current one, and maybe the number from last session (which reveals if things are progressing in the desired direction).  Beyond that, I find a more persistent and cumulative tracking to be rare indeed.  Few coaches take it upon themselves to design and implement a way to keep detailed score for their coachees, and even fewer coachees do so (which is often part of why they’re being coached on it).

This lack of real data robs the coaching process of valuable insights about what’s working and what’s not, and makes actual results and progress much less obvious.  Even worse, the state of going in circles can be completely hidden by a myopic focus on just the new and recent.  Ever notice how overall stagnation can become obscured by disproportionate celebration of the occasional win?

Communication is skimpy and unstructured.  For something like 99% of designated coaching sessions, I think it’s safe to say the communication is top notch: ideas are being explored, things are getting heard and worked through, rapport is strong & highly functional.  That’s what makes a coach a coach, right?  So let us for now take that part for granted.

Outside of these designated blocks, however, communication is generally far less than it could be.  You often have situations where coachee could benefit from a few words between sessions, and coach would be all too happy to provide them.  A little “Hey coach, I’m stuck on this thing and a little input would really help.” in the middle of the week can prevent a complete halt in progress until the next session.

The problem is how to open up these lightweight lines of communication so that a coachee is comfortable reaching out, correcting for the tendency for over politeness (a desire to not be a burden), and pride that wants never to admit needing help.  Even the coach who clearly advertises an open door policy will find coachees who reach out way less than perhaps they should.

Documentation is sparse and scattered.  At the end of a few months of coaching, what a coachee is often left with is often a series of hand-scribbled notes, a few email exchanges, perhaps some worksheets filled out, and memories of some probably pretty great sessions, either in person over the phone.

(And of course the results they got, which may be quite tangible and obvious, but then again may not.)

Sparse and/or scattered documentation leaves a coachee with less by which to appreciate the results and value of being coached, leaves a coach with less by which to gauge effectiveness and improve for future engagements, and leaves an organization with less by which to assess how a given coaching program performed against expectations.

Rectifying these Issues

The above observations are not meant as an indictment of the coaching process or profession, but rather as a candid acknowledgment of common barriers to an overall quite powerful discipline.

Here was my thinking in creating CoachAccountable as a means to overcome these barriers.

All 4 of these barriers are occurrences of omission: they reflect the absence of deliberately created solutions.  These are understandable omissions as the issues themselves are largely invisible, representing missed opportunities more than actual in-your-face problems.  Even the more visible issue of follow-through is widely accepted to be intrinsically hard, but that acceptance betrays a lack of curiosity that the situation somehow could be made better.

So I looked for how software could be the deliberately created solution to the 4 issues, with an emphasis on making it as little work as possible to add to an established style of coaching.  (After all, if using the software created much more work to realize wins, then all it would be doing, effectively, is chiding users to work harder in order to have better results–well duh, that’s not a service so much as an obvious platitude.)

So how can software solve these issues?

Software is really good at sending messages on schedule, so automatic reminders serve to keep action plans alive and visible (for both coach and coachee) during the time between coaching sessions.  Worksheet assignments and the task of tracking quantitative progress (i.e. metrics) are also augmented with automated reminders.  These are all ways by which the coach can give little nudges to coachees between coaching sessions, do so with no extra work, and collectively result in a lot more follow through.

Software is also really good at managing numbers and creating pretty graphs (graphs that reveal a lot of insight about bursts, stagnation, and everything in between).  Coupled with super easy ways to regularly track data (think reminders via email or text and the ability to enter data with a simple reply, NOT needing to log in or even be at a computer), metrics give a major leg up on the problem of tracking progress.

Software provides a handy medium for communication, collaboration and sharing, just ask anyone who’s used a popular social network.  Culturally we’re fast becoming super accustomed to posting and commenting on happenings online, and this sort of interaction turns out to be a great channel of communication between coach and coachee as a coaching relationship unfolds.  When actions, worksheets, metrics and more can all be commented upon, it effectively facilitates any number of on-topic mini conversational threads, all done by email yet all centrally organized.

When software is routinely used to do these other things (structuring action plans, fostering communication, managing assignments, etc.), then the computer already has a pretty detailed record of happenings.  With a nicely organized presentation of those records, a coach and coachee are left with thorough documentation.

And thus CoachAccountable is designed around these principles: follow-through, tracking, communication, and documentation.  These oft-overlooked aspects of great coaching are critical, because ultimately they are a multiplier for the expertise, insights, and perspective that coaching provides.

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Ready to up your coaching game and solve these problems with your clients? Start with a free 30-day trial today.

CoachAccountable Metrics are a powerful tool for measuring results over a span of time, yes, but beyond that, there’s magic in the measuring.

To illustrate, I give you PushupTober: a month of doing pushups regularly.  For the whole month the game is to do a single set, done once per day.  Starting at a manageable (but for most people will still make you sore) 15 pushups on day 1, and climbing to a goal of 45 pushups at the end of the month.

I did PushupTober for the month of October.  I want to do more pushups because they are a super easy exercise, work well with my current life of world travel, and I get nice, noticeable definition in my upper body whenever I actually stick to them¹.

The problem is sticking to them.  My usual thing with pushups is to get inspired one particular day, do a set of like 20 or 30 until burnout, be super sore the next day, give myself a few days to recover, and then completely forget to resume when the soreness fades.  I forget because the inspiration has faded with it.

So I created a metric for this pushup problem, to see how deliberately structuring my efforts my help.

As stated above, I chose a starting target of 15 pushups for day 1, and 45 for day 31.  This gives a target trend line that goes up 1 pushup per day.  I knew I wouldn’t burn myself out with 15 to start, and 45 would be a stretch goal for the end of the month.  That was all the thinking I gave to it.  I set a 7pm daily reminder and then let the machine (with its reminders, graphs, and arithmetic) do the rest of the work.

At first it was fun.  I played through the mild soreness of the first few days as my body got back into the groove of doing pushups, clear each time of what I had to hit in order to stay on track.

Then I got hooked on seeing that extra green area on my graph, which happens when your number is above the trend line.  I kept wanting to eek out the extra one or two, because green on the graph looks GOOD: a satisfying visual representation of going above and beyond.

By two weeks in I couldn’t forget: taking the time to do pushups once a day was just simply wired in me, an exhilarating break in my day that was building tangible fitness.  The reminder email that CoachAccountable sent was no longer reminding me, it was just my cue to reply with my number for the day.  A minute later the system would reply to tell me how I was doing, a nice bit of reinforcement.

On the 14th I had my first heartbreaking result: my body was wanting a day off to recover, so I did just a dozen to keep with the habit.  With 12 pushups I was below my target for the day, and thus my graph had its first red blotch.

There would be several more throughout the month, and I continued to do the best I could, stayed focused on reaching my end goal (45 pushups in a single set by the end of one month), and added comments as I went with hopes of revealing insights about tendencies, what works, and what doesn’t.  You can see those comments when you mouse over the data points on the graph.

By the end of the month I was acutely aware of how I was stacking up against my goal, and determined to push hard to reach it.  Usually by this time the game of regular pushups would have faded away as just another good idea, already forgotten 3 weeks ago.

By contrast, seeing my graph with just a few data points left to put on it made the here and now very real, the goal and my performance very tangible.

The result was very good.  Though there’s a lot of red, I made my end goal of doing 45 pushups in a single set, and, well, my lovely wife was rather pleased with the results as well. :)

Doing a bunch of pushups is just a small part of life, but a clear illustration of mindfully setting up a goal and having a powerful and essentially automated structure to support it.  Just imagine what sort of goals you could support with the people you coach.

If you don’t have one already, you can get your own account with this premiere coaching software in just one minute, sign up here.

A new major piece of CoachAccountable has just been released: Courses.

Courses allow coaches to define their own courses & coaching programs as a series of Actions, Metric trackings, Worksheet assignments and more.  These items are placed over a timeline which consists of as many days as the course or program is long.  Compose a timeline consisting of these items and the course is ready for people to go through.

Participants can be put into courses at any time, as many as you like and whenever you like, and either all in sync or in an ad hoc fashion.  CoachAccountable handles the release of course assignments and materials for each participant according to the timeline you set.  For greater flexibility, an individual’s participation in a course can be paused at any time.  Course participation can also be fast-forwarded or  rewound however a coach deems appropriate.

As the course progresses for your participants, you can see at a glance how they are doing with respect to their assignments:

If you’ve ever wanted to design and implement repeatable programs for the people you coach, or even if you have a standard sequence of assignments and events that mark the beginning weeks of your typical client relationships, CoachAccountable courses might be just the thing for you.  Courses are also great for routine & repeatable training procedures.

Just released, hot-off-the-press and ripe for consumption: “CoachAccountable’s Poignant Guide to coaching with CoachAccountable”.

CoachAccountable does wonders for structuring coaching relationships, but it takes a bit of experimentation to get into a style that has the tools really work for you.

Until now.

This guide takes the guesswork out of how to set things up for you and the people you coach.  It is designed to be a light but super-useful read, a bit cheeky at times but serious about the subject.  It is not comprehensive documentation of the software and its features, as that would be boring.  Rather it a series of discussions focused on the various benefits that CoachAccountable provides, centered around structural topics that arise over the course of coaching relationships.  Readers are invited to jump around to only those topics that are of interest.

Even if you don’t ever end up using CoachAccountable, the guide holds a lot of ideas and practices that you can apply immediately to your own coaching practice.

Download your copy.

Metrics are great for documenting progress and telling the story behind the numbers.  By the same token they are a great way to showcase the results that your coaching produces for your clients.  After all, nothing demonstrates progress and results quite like real numbers.

CoachAccountable now allows you to embed an interactive metric graph with just a snippet of HTML.  Here’s what one looks like:

[iframe src=”https://www.coachaccountable.com/specialActions?a=EM&x=NZSGjfqAKJcFI2EA3iRw6koLpyLKWc” style=”border: none; padding: 0;” width=”100%” height=”300″]

Mouse over the graph to see annotations and specifics relating to the target: it’s a dense presentation of information that really captures the progression of results over time.

Getting the snippet of HTML for embedding a metric is simple: just click to edit a metric, and grab the embed code from the bottom of the editor window.  Paste it onto your website or in your blog, and you’re showing off results to the world.

Want to impress would-be clients?  Showcase the results you’ve produced with one of your clients at this level of detail, and your prospective customer will have a really clear sense of what they could gain by working with you.  Makes a great centerpiece for a case study, or even a blog post.

…And while I was away, CA sent all the reminders to them ;-) Just simplifies my life…

– From Dr. John Kenworthy of Celsim, remarked about CoachAccountable and his coachees after returning from vacation.

When coaching engagements fail, it is far less likely to be a problem of insufficiently brilliant coaching than it is a matter of simple follow through.

Seriously.  Look in your own coaching, or mentorship or training you’ve provided for others.  Chances are high that you were quite qualified to provide the sort of coaching and guidance you were charged to provide, both in your expertise and your ability to communicate that expertise.  It’s the follow through where things typically fall apart, if they fall apart.  It’s whatever happens in the days or weeks following a coaching session when you’re no longer there while the rest of generally busy life is.  The spaces in between your coaching sessions are the real wildcard in your coaching and thus coaching results.

Life comes up.  Inspiration is perishable.  Good ideas fade.  We all wrestle with these truths as we strive to cause great outcomes with the people we coach.

With surprising regularity, follow through and failure to follow through is a just matter of awareness.  Assuming we are doing good coaching, we don’t set up our clients with an action plan that is unrealistic¹.  Also assuming we are doing good coaching, we don’t set up our clients with an action plan that isn’t meaningful and worth doing.

So if a plan is genuinely doable (it should be), and worth doing (it should be), then just plain forgetting about it is the most likely opportunity for it to be derailed.

Never underestimate the power of forgetting.  I myself have been in coaching programs where, during a session, I finally take out my action plan from last week, haphazardly mark off the things I happened to get done, and say “aw shucks” to the rest.  It wasn’t that the sizable percentage of undone things was too hard, or that it wasn’t worth doing.  It’s just that I assumed I would remember, because I was so excited about the plan when I made it in the first place.  I didn’t really have any structure for making myself remember to check in on the plan a few times during the week, and so I was always surprised when “Wow, what do you know–the week is already over and I didn’t look at this thing once.”

The people you coach do this too.

Forgetting is the default, and without a real structure to remember that’s better than “I’ll remember to check on this later when I’ve got a few minutes” it will be exercised with frightening regularity.

Now then, you can’t be looking over the shoulders of the people you coach all the time, but you can put some structures in place for the people you coach.  This is what CoachAccountable has been rigorously polished to do in a smooth and unobtrusive way.  When your client creates an Action in CoachAccountable, they are simply entering the “What” and the “By When”.

But beyond that, Actions come with reminders.  The system suggests 2 by default as a useful nudge².  As many as desired can be set, just a few clicks and all relative to the due date.

Reminders are the way to keep the action plan alive and in motion between your coaching sessions.  Because your client can respond to a reminder (either by email or text) to mark the action done, it’s very little work to keep current with what’s done and what’s not.  Better yet, it’s satisfying to mark actions complete in a purely hedonistic way.  It’s the gamification of follow through.

So reminders help your client keep aware of what to work on during their week and make it fun and easy to mark things done.  You as coach can keep abreast of things too with Action notifications.  Here are the options you have to play with:

Now this is where it gets to be like CoachAccountable is an angel sitting on your shoulder, helpfully whispering in your ear what’s happening (or not happening) with all of your clients as the weeks progress.  You might prefer to remain hands off until next session, but you also might find you can do a world of good by offering your clients a quick check-up mid-week if nothing is getting done.

 

So that’s what CoachAccountable Actions can do for your coaching.  There’s no silver bullet to making the people you coach fulfill on everything they set out to fulfill, but believe me, taking “I forgot” off the table goes a long way towards ensuring your brilliant coaching advice gets acted upon, and your clients get the results they came to you for.

If you don’t already have a CoachAccountable account you can try one for free for 30 days, sign up and try our smart to-do lists and so much more.

In coaching we often need to share files.  File resources for your clients can take all kinds of shapes: e-books, images, slides, videos, audio clips.  In the course of a coaching engagement, your style may call for sharing such files.

The most obvious and basic way to do this is to email ’em on over as an attachment.  From that simple baseline, let’s look at how CoachAccountable can do you a few better.

CoachAccountable file sharing works by either coach or client uploading a file, and the other party securely accessing it with a single click.  How does this improve upon email attachments?

First, mobility.  You might use web-based email (meaning your attachments are available wherever you are), but your clients might not.  CoachAccountable file sharing is inherently web-based, meaning you and your clients can always access shared files with an internet connection.

Second, accommodating large files.  Audio and video tend to be in the 10’s of MB or more.  Most email providers still have a cap on how large a file you can send, making emailing impossible for most substantive audio and video.  While we’re on the subject of file size, large files sitting in your inbox use up valuable disk quota in web-based email systems, which might affect you and/or your clients (i.e. a video might take up 20MB in your account as the sender, and 20MB in your client’s account as the receiver). With CoachAccountable, you can even embed video and audio files so they play right in the app.

Third, sharing the same file with multiple people.  Perhaps your coaching style entails one or more file resources that you share with everyone you coach.  With CoachAccountable you upload files once to your library, and with a few clicks share them with clients as called for.  If you have 30 people that you’re coaching and your program calls for them all to watch the same video, it is much nicer to upload it just one time to your library, and share it with all 30. You can also share multiple files with multiple people at once, or share with a group.

Forth, secured private access.  This is no different from the email route, but a nice benefit over other ways of sharing files like putting them on a website.  Without a lot of hassle, files shared in CoachAccountable are accessible only to authorized parties.

Fifth, awareness.  CoachAccountable tracks if and when your client accesses the files you share with them, giving you a little window into how well they’re keeping up with the materials.

Sixth, comment threads.  When you share a file, there might be a little back-and-forth about it, dialog like the one below.  Commenting on a shared file is as simple as replying to the email notification, and CoachAccountable files this all in context in the coaching stream which makes it easy to review later.

File sharing online is nothing revolutionary, but CoachAccountable provides a few ways to make it a little nicer and a little easier.  Best of all, it fosters dialog between you and your client, allowing you to better know where they’re at and offer timely support.  Just a few more wins you can get when you use specialized coaching software.

One of the hardest things about incorporating technology into a given style of coaching is knowing how to do so in an unobtrusive way: to find structures that are useful, but not burdensome to you or the people you are coaching.

Do you email worksheets back and forth?  Set up  a shared Google doc?  Incorporate some sort of online appointment scheduler?  How about a system for setting invoices and receiving payment?  Or a to-do list app that can be shared?

There are a lot of options to wade through, and it is NOT obvious how to have a system that really hums, jibes with the way you coach, and is easy to use for clients.

It turns out I’m kinda passionate about the intersection of coaching and technology, so I’ve got some thoughts to contribute on the matter.  I’ve created a 30 day email course that goes deep into the subject, and provides a lot of insight about how and why technology can provide big wins for any style of coaching.

This course is free and delivered as a series of 8 emails.  In it you’ll learn how to employ technology to make your coaching easier, more engaging, less time consuming, more effective, easier to sell to new clients, and more.  When you sign up you’ll immediately get your free report: 5 ways to improve ANY style of coaching with technology, which is a primer on how you can start using technology tools in coaching.  Check it out.

A number of new goodies have been added to CoachAccountable, this time with an emphasis on making the system even easier and smoother to use.

One-Click Access to Worksheet Assignments

When you assign a worksheet to one of your clients, the email notification of the assignment they get now contains a magic link that puts them one click away from working on it.  It’s a marked improvement from earlier, which was a link that took them to a page which first prompted them to log in.  Making the process of being coached by you easier is always a good thing.

One-Click Access to Shared files

In a similar vein, whenever you share a file with a client (and vice-versa), the email notification contains a magic link allowing the receiving party to download the file with a single click.

Email Reminder Reply Replies

Earlier I added the ability of people to reply to reminder emails in order to record metric data or mark actions complete–a nice shortcut to keeping things up to date without having to log in.  Now when someone enters data in this way, and email reply comes back letting them know how they are doing.

For metrics, it’s a message about how things are stacking up against your goal:

40 has been recorded for the 17th.

You are 9 push ups above your 10/17  target (31 push ups).

If you need to change this for the 17th, just reply to this email with a new number.

For actions, it’s a statement of how you did relative to the due date:

Add email reply functionality has been marked complete as of 9:34am on Thursday, October 18th.

This action was due 7pm on Friday, October 19th, which makes it done 1 day ahead of schedule.  Nice!

Comment on (Almost) Any Notification

Whenever files are shared, session notes or journal entries are emailed, and worksheets are submitted, the other party gets a notification.  In addition to containing the particulars of the item, either coach or client can reply to the email to make a comment on that item.  Comments appear in your coaching stream, and are instantly emailed to the other party (which can they can then reply to).   This makes a nice touch point for communication between coach and client about particular items in the coaching relationship, and it’s all captured and organized by CoachAccountable.

Gravatar Recognition

Gravatar is short for “globally recognized avatar”, meaning folks can have a picture of themselves associated with their email.  Now when any user is created (i.e. a coach signing up or a coach adding a new client) the system now checks Gravatar for an avatar associated with the email, and imports it right on in if found.  This saves everyone the step of uploading a head shot.

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And that’s what’s new.  Nothing earth shattering, just a lot of nice little bits that give the system a really polished feel.